Archive for March, 2009
An awesome rant on the state of the IT industry by JoeWare
Mar 14th
Joe is an Admin after my own heart! I read this cover letter for his resume and knew AtA readers would enjoy this as well. I found it from a link off of Phil’s MindCircus blog. Check it out:
Here is the home for my resume. I am not actively looking for work but I will always look at opportunities because I wouldn’t be where I am now if I didn’t keep my eyes and mind open to alternate possibilities. At the moment I am into working for the money, once I become independently wealthy I will work for fun and take up sympathy/charity cases for the challenge. As of right now my non-for profit and charity work is limited to my free tools and my responses in the community to various newsgroup and listserv questions.
Note that overall the computer industry in my opinion is in sad shape. You have a bunch of people working with computers who shouldn’t be and a bunch of companies trying to pay nothing for people with good knowledge. To the people lying on their resumes to get the "Good" jobs I say – "Stop it!". You are hurting yourself and the overall state of the industry, you will get yourself into something you can’t handle and look like an idiot. This also forces the companies to downgrade resumes when they see them and not believe what is written plus offer people who actually may be good crap salaries.
What is a crap salary you ask? A crap salary is a company posting for some expert with 5-10 years of experience in some field and several other fields and then saying the salary will be $20-30 an hour. If you have someone you are looking at that is a good thinker you better be starting at $50+ an hour with a ton of benefits and guarantees or looking at $100+ for straight hourly work. To put it another way, if someone offered me $30 an hour I would ask them why I shouldn’t just be a manager at a Best Buy or something like that. I made that much 10 years ago selling TV’s at Montgomery Wards and that was far less stress and pain than a full time tech job trying to make systems safe for the masses. And if you as a company offered someone that and they took it, you have to wonder… Are they that bad? Are they that desperate? Are they just biding their time until they go do something else and leave you cold.
Companies should start looking at tech talent like the sports teams look at athletic talent. Are you having tech issues in your company? Do you have tech superstars or do you have third stringers working to get into "safe" position or management and hide until retirement? I haven’t met many really good tech people who "wanted" to go to management or want to find a safe position, they want to accomplish things. There are exceptions to the management item… People who did tech because it was a way to get in the door to get to a management position and are bright enough to do pretty much anything. If you want a tech superstar, you will find that that is a person who has no desire to be in management and actually doesn’t need much management and doesn’t want to hang with management. Do yourself and your superstars a favor by not forcing them into management – read up on Peter’s Principal for more info.
At this point in time, most companies with computers actually need computer tech specialists. You are the least dependent on computers right now as you EVER will be. They will just get more and more important and if you intend to simply coast on whatever talent you get for some poor pay, you deserve everything that happens. I have no problem hearing that tech specialists make more than their managers. IMO, in many cases they should make considerably more. It is the tech specialists who keep your company’s tech running efficiently.
Clipped from JoeWare.net’s Resume Introduction found HERE.
Some words from our Admin and a great time waster!
Mar 13th
Hey there AtA fans! I have been crazy busy lately with my 9 to 5 and I have taken on some more writing gigs. Maybe not as busy as our AtA mascot hanging on the left but still busy nonetheless!
I am still doing my 3 articles a week for MakeUseOf.com and I have been averaging 1 eBook a month for them as well. I just posted my second post to GeeksAreSexy.net. If you want to check out my posts click the following links:
- http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/author/karl-l-gechlik/
- http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2009/03/12/how-to-reset-your-lost-2003-active-directory-admin-password/
- http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2009/03/04/how-to-recovering-your-windows-password/
And I was quoted in the New York Times recently but I never linked you to the online article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/technology/personaltech/09basics.html?pagewanted=print
And as promised here is today’s great time waster. A goodie brought to my attention by GAS writer Brian Boyko:
Find out if you are a Network Rockstar here http://www.networkrockstarchallenge.com/ or by clicking the image above. I have gotten 8/10 anyone do better? Is it just me or do the questions get harder each time I play?
Got some tips or hacks to share with our readers – then send us an email to tips@askTheAdmin.com
Interested in writing for us? Email WriteForAtA@AskTheAdmin.com today and let me know what you could add to our already awesome team!
Drop box invites.
Mar 13th
I have been getting a lot of emails asking for DropBox invites. I do not know how many I have left but I will put them out here for you. Consider it a first come, first served basis.
You need to go to this link and sign up: https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTQ3OTM5
DropBox is a free storage bin on the internet for all your porn work! For those of you that don’t know what dropBox is – check out our review here:
http://www.asktheadmin.com/2008/04/dropbox-review.html
Enjoy!
Sonicwall silently releases a settings converter from Sonic OS Standard to Sonic OS Enhanced!
Mar 13th
I just got off the phone with a Sonicwall rep and they informed me that they have released this new tool. They have not made it public knowledge yet – so I thought I would! If you have ever needed to flash a Sonicwall and then re-input ALL your settings from scratch you will appreciate this!
https://convert.global.sonicwall.com/
SonicOS Standard to Enhanced Settings Converter
The SonicOS Standard to Enhanced Settings Converter is designed to convert a SonicOS Standard Network Settings file to be compatible with a target SonicOS Enhanced appliance. Due to the more advanced nature of SonicOS Enhanced, its Network Settings file is more complex than the one SonicOS Standard uses. They are not compatible. The Setting Converter creates an entirely new target Enhanced Network Setting file based on the network settings found in the source Standard file. This allows for a rapid upgrade from a Standard deployment to an Enhanced one with no time wasted in re-creating network policies.
Do you use Sonicwalls? Have you used the Enhanced OS? What do you think?
How to make a quick transparent image for your website using Photoshop – A quick How-To for beginners
Mar 13th
Hey Kiddies,
Commodore 64 here with a quick how-to for Photoshop. Have you ever downloaded an image you’d like to use on your website but it was sandwiched on top of some ghastly color which totally doesn’t fit with your “flow”? Well here is a quick, no-frills, way to a transparent image that you can set to a background of your choosing.
First we start with simple image of a leaf:
Double click the “Background” and then hit enter when the dialog pops up. You should now have a transparency capable layer which is ready to have it’s fat trimmed, the layer name should change from “Background” to “Layer 0″:
We then take out our trusty magic wand tool and select the white around the leaf by clicking the white part around the leaf. In this cased I’ve used a tolerance of 80 to produce a decent result. You can play around with the tolerance depending on the image you choose to work with to get the selection border where you need it. In this case, our subject image has a dark shadow. Our tolerance of 80 has allowed the selection form to come in closer to the leaf, eliminating most of the shadow from the inside of the selection border as shown in the following image:
Hit delete to produce the following:
At this point you have a choice of filling in your own background color, in Photoshop and saving for web as a jpeg, or you can save for web as a transparent gif and apply matting in the intended target’s background color of your choice. In the following example I want to put the leaf on a blue background on my intended destination for this graphic. I do this buy removing the selection I already have by clicking anywhere in the work window with a marquee tool, or pressing ctrl-D for “deselect.” I then go to File menu, Save For Web and save with the following options:
Hit the save button, name your file and give it a home. That’s It. Now this isn’t the most professional or precise way of doing this, but if you need a quick easy design flow control with image backgrounds, this is the 5-step, 5-minute move to get you on your way.
Enjoy!
Commodore64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)
Using Virtual Server 2005 to run a virtual machine on Windows Home Server
Mar 13th
As you might have read on AtA, Windows Home Server (WHS) is Awesome.
WHS backs up all the machines on my network for me, gives me a central location to store all my files (MP3′s, Photo’s, etc) with redundancy in case a drive fails, gives me remote access to my files, and is able to do so much more…
But it can’t do everything. The OS partition for WHS is small and to get your application to start after WHS boots you need to either log on to the server and start it or get it to run as a service. Neither of which is a perfect solution if you want to do something automatically.
For example, I wanted to download podcasts to my podcast folder on my WHS. I could have just installed HappyFish, my current rss aggregator, to the WHS and let it do the work but if the server rebooted I wouldn’t always know I needed to remote in to the WHS and re-launch HappyFish, and I had other programs I wanted to run as well. What to do?
As it turns out WHS is based on the Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 supports Virtual Server 2005, therefore Windows Virtual Server 2005 will run on Windows Home Server. Whew, type ‘Windows’ much…
Using Windows Virtual PC on a local machine, I created a virtual Windows XP Machine and did all the current Windows Updates and installed HappyFish. Doing this locally was easier for me since I installed the OS using my local DVD drive and my local machine has a faster processor than my WHS but you can potentially install from within VS2005.
Next you will need to:
- Install VS2005 on your Windows Home Server. I kept the suggested port of 1024
- Create share for virtual machines on your Windows Home Server ( ex. \\whs\virtualMachines ) and copy the virtual image files to a folder there.
- Launch your browser (Only IE supports running the virutal images from the browser) and head over to the Virtual Server web interface. http://whs:1024 for me.
- Next add your new virtual machine under Virtual Machines by clicking Add and supply the path to your share with the virtual machine image you created. \\whs\VirtualMachineImages\WindowsXPPro\WinXP.vmc for me.
- Now you can configure the virtual machine by choosing Configure under Virtual Machines and selecting the virtual machine. Since the server will need to be restarted occasionally I decided to have the virtual machine always automatically start when the server starts and save state and keep undo disks on shut down. These settings are under ‘General Properties’. To automatically start the virtual machine you need to supply user credentials for an account on the WHS that will have access to the virtual machine files. I chose to use the administrator account.
- Next you need to add a network. Under ‘Network Adapters’ choose the External Network with the name of the adapter in the Windows Home Server. This will give your virtual machine a virtual network adapter and connect it to your LAN through the physical adapter in the WHS.
- I Setup my virtual machine to set it’s own IP Statically. Depending on your LAN setup and how you hand out IP’s you may need to make some changes to get your new virtual machine an IP.
You will see that VS2005 warns that SSL security is not enabled. As long as you are not opening up your VS2005 ports to the outside you can ignore this warning as the only unencrypted data is staying within your LAN.
Depending on how you plan to manage your virtual machines you may not need to open up these ports. Since my image is an XP Pro image I turned on Remote Access and I can use Remote Desktop Connection to gain access to the virtual machine. I also installed the connector software ( but turned off backups ) and can use the WHS login page to remote to this machine from anywhere just like any other machine on my LAN via the WHS web front end.
If I need to access the VS2005 page from the outside I can Remote to any machine and use a browser from that machine.
After this little bit of work you now have a machine on your LAN with access to your WHS shares that is on all the time. It’s even green since you are utilizing a machine that is on all the time already without having to to add another machine with a power supply .
HP has sent us a sneak peak as to what is coming up for next year. Stay tuned for the exciting details over the next few weeks. And if you have any WHS work-a-rounds or hacks… WE WANT TO KNOW! That is what the comments are for.
